OUR AMERICA-AS-GERMANY ROLE

Christopher LayneCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Forty years after VE Day, American foreign policy still is profoundly affected by the lingering consequences of Germany`s defeat.

The destruction of German power, and the political and economic collapse of the rest of Western Europe, left a power vacuum the United States was forced to fill. To contain Moscow and shield Western Europe`s political and economic recovery, the United States assumed the role in the European balance of power theretofore played by Germany. In a way, America became Germany.

America-as-Germany is an increasingly risky and burdensome policy that could lead to U.S. involvement in a nuclear war. It is a major cause of our worsening strategic overextension and is both the substance and the symbol of the political stalemate in Soviet-American relations.

According to a recent Public Agenda Foundation survey, 81 percent of Americans mistakenly believe it is our policy to use nuclear weapons if, and only if, the Soviet Union attacks the United States first with nuclear weapons. The reality, however, is different.

Since the 1950s, NATO strategy has been based on ''extended deterrence''--the American commitment to use nuclear weapons in Germany`s defense. Bonn consistently has rejected a credible NATO conventional defense strategy in favor of a policy that makes Washington`s use of nuclear weapons as nearly automatic as possible. The Germans believe a strategy based on the risk of escalation to an all-out nuclear conflict is the best deterrent to war, but the implications of this strategy for the U.S. are sobering.

During the era of U.S. strategic nuclear superiority (to about 1970), extended deterrence was a sensible strategy; in today`s strategic environment it is suicidal. Were the U.S. to redeem its nuclear pledge to West Germany, Moscow could respond in kind and America itself would be exposed to Soviet nuclear attack. Thus, extended deterrence now depends on the credibility of a threat that rational American decision-makers could not--and should not--carry out. This strategy is a bad bargain for the U.S. because its risks fall disproportionately on this country.

In September, 1946, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes pledged that U.S. troops would stay in Germany as long as Soviet forces remained there. Although we have honored this pledge, it is doubtful that Byrnes (or other U.S. officials at the time) envisioned that, four decades after the end of World War II, 300,000 American troops would still be there. America-as-Germany (in NATO`s guise) accounts for 58 percent of the U.S. defense budget. America would be better off devolving to a reunified Germany the responsibility for containing Soviet power in Europe.

''Some day,'' George F. Kennan wrote in 1948, ''our forces must leave central Europe. Some day Soviet forces must leave. Some day Germany must again become a sovereign and independent entity. The question is when?'' Forty years after VE day, it is time to begin thinking about a transition from the post-World War II settlement to a new post-Alliance system based on German reunification and the withdrawal of American forces from Europe.

There are risks in raising the disengagement and German reunification issues--but there is an even greater risk in pretending that history ended in 1945. As long as Soviet and American forces confront each other along the Elbe, divided Germany remains the most dangerous theater of the superpower rivalry. As long as Germany remains divided, Europe will remain divided, thereby foreclosing the hopes of the increasingly restive Eastern Europeans that the Kremlin, while insisting that Eastern Europe remain within the Soviet security sphere, will grant them the freedom to undertake internal political and economic reforms.

For the United States, the question is simple: How much longer are we willing to play the geopolitical role of America-as-Germany, with its attendant dangers and costs? To maintain the status quo and reject the possibility of moving to a post-Alliance European security system is to condemn the U.S. to bear indefinitely the nuclear risks and economic burdens of America-as-Germany and its corollary, the NATO commitment.